TSA Gallery presents "House/Hole"
September 2010
2GQ.org
Portland, Oregon, USA
By Mandy Catalano
Artist Emily Stone, showing her new site-specific installation "House/Hole" for our TSA Gallery, has requested that guests plan to attend a closing night event on November 1, Day of the Dead, instead of the previously announced opening this Friday, October 1.
"House/Hole" is an ongoing, transforming work happening outdoors on SE 36th Avenue in Portland, between Salmon and Taylor streets. It will begin October 1 and evolve throughout the month, sometimes with live presence and performance by Emily. We invite you to wander by and check it out any time... and hope you will join us for the Day of the Dead ritual.
TSA / Temporary Semi-Autonomous Art
The TSA Gallery series of temporary, semi-autonomous art works, is a production of New Oregon Arts & Letters. Project instigator Tiffany Lee Brown said she sees TSA as a natural extension of how Portland organically creates and disseminates creativity.
"It's where home meets public art. The front garden where the 2010 episodes of TSA is taking place represents the intersection of public and home life," said Brown. "It's a liminal space."
Using your own garden or sidewalk as an art venue makes the art experience accessible to everyone—artists, viewers, and curators alike. "We didn't have very many legit venues twenty years ago," she adds, "and nobody had money. So in the nineties in Portland, we put on salons in our houses, for poetry and art."
Brown remembered growing up in Oregon in the 1980s as well, near the town of Eugene. "It was all about bands in basements, underground parties," she explained. In bigger cities, lofts and warehouses might play a bigger role in DIY creative production, "but here, houses and gardens are plentiful."
These days in Portland, Appendix Project Space near Alberta Street turns a home garage into a gallery, while the thematic territory of domesticity sparks local shows including the M. K. Guth-curated "House Arrest" at Worksound Gallery and Emily Stone's production "Domestic/Wild" at Performance Works NorthWest.
PWNW's theatre venue finds a proper studio and stage sometimes overlap with personal space; director Linda Austin lives on-site, and her home kitchen doubles as a lobby during shows.
Stone, Brown, and other women artists of New Oregon Arts & Letters (formerly called 2GQ, at that time a project within 2 Gyrlz Performative Arts) mounted another collision of domesticity and theater called "House Bound" at Performance Works in 2007.
Brown said, "I'm into exploring how art and other forms of expression manifest themselves in public space, especially unsanctioned space... but also how our society marginalizes and dismisses the creative and community work we do at home."
Institutions, funding, and the media often play no part in that work, a fact that has been highlighted by influential feminist artists and writers like Karen Finley, Linda Montano, and Judy Chicago.
Southeast Portland's relaxed creative feel is part of the point. "TSA is starting off in the Sunnyside neighborhood," according to Brown. "There's a poetry garden a few blocks away. This is where City Repair transformed ideas about urban living by transforming an intersection, back in the '90s. The Horse Project does well in this part of Portland, too—those awesome plastic ponies tied to the city's old horse tie-up rings, started by Scott Wayne Indiana."
Applying a curatorial hand to this homespun, DIY tradition felt natural to Brown, who has explored intimate space and unsanctioned public space in art, performance, and writing. "I spent several years investigating home and my immediate neighborhood through art," she explained.
"I was going through an intense process of grief and found myself kind of confined a lot. Plus I work at home as a freelance writer, and now I'm pregnant. I thought, well, maybe woman's place is in the home, after all. Maybe art's place is in the home, too."
It doesn't hurt that New Oregon is headquartered in an office—a home office, of course—right in the neighborhood. Next spring, Brown hopes to curate TSA events and installations throughout eastside Portland.
NEW OREGON ARTS & LETTERS
The new publisher of longtime Portland magazine Plazm and presenter of the New Oregon Interview Series, this nonprofit organization was formerly called 2GQ. It was an ongoing project that was part of 2 Gyrlz Performative Arts. The group has presented literature, performance, art, and publications in Portland for over eight years. "I thought of it as 2 Gyrlz's nerdy little cousin," said Brown, smiling.
The mission of New Oregon Arts & Letters is to create and present arts, literature, and media. Its programming encourages collaboration, supports interdisciplinary practices, and contextualizes creative culture. Participants are committed to fostering innovation, integrity, and critical dialogue across a broad range of communities.
Along with publishing and media projects, New Oregon is known for performance work and multidisciplinary extravaganzas like "Exquisite Language" at the Heathman Hotel and "Light + Shadows" at Yoga Shala of Portland—shows that involved over 100 artists, writers, and musicians. Earlier this decade, the group combined literary readings with performance at Wordstock, Powell's City of Books, Gallery 500, and other Portland venues.
Under the umbrella of 2 Gyrlz Performative Arts, 2GQ collaborated with the annual Enteractive Language Festival for four years beginning in 2002. EL-fest brought international and local talent in performance, theatre, body art, experimental film, music, and more to venues throughout Portland—some aboveground, some underground. The Vanguard described EL-fest as "filled with more strangeness and wonder than your average art festival."
In 2010, New Oregon launched the TSA Gallery of temporary, semi-autonomous art. Thanks to grants from RACC, the Regional Arts & Culture Council, and the Oregon Cultural Trust, this year New Oregon will also publish a new issue of PLAZM magazine and a new collective content website at plazm.org.
New Oregon collaborates with DIY-style producers in a cooperative approach as well, creating experimental and exploratory work including "House Bound" at Performance Works NorthWest, the "Public Works" series of works in progress at Someday Lounge, and "The Easter Island Project," at locations throughout the US and South America.